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Monday, April 25, 2005

the book in my hand

Not only is this the cover of my new book but I have now held it in my hands. It will soon be available in Australia (I'm told three weeks) and I will be launching it at the Sydney Writers Festival in late May.

And it is available through Salt's on-line shop as well amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and other on-line bookshops.

I've been re-reading it, partly to check for any boo-boos (none so far, cross paws, except for a small omission), and to reacquaint myself with the book as book.

The front cover photo was taken by Annette down at La Perouse. She was down at the same place again last week, this time with her medium format camera when she took a pic of the same place, but it's quite a different shot. I like this one still.

Here are some kind comments some people have made about the book:

"Jill Jones' poems are trusting, human and exact. They anticipate possibility, the invisible, sometimes abrupt edges of comprehension, while inviting alert contact with the material world. Her voice is propelled by a knowledge that through poetic artifice deep discoveries can be made in the seams between language, self and shared experience. This work is sharp, sassy and maturely anti-romantic, sorting the strengths of contemporary Australian poetry." - Peter Minter

"In the last few years, Australian poet Jill Jones has emerged as a writer of extraordinary fluency and richness. These new poems, often trance-like and fragmentary, grow from a deep sense of temporal process and the mobility of feeling. They capture the quick and the pulse of the world around them. If they are hard to define, that is because Jones gathers words and speech on the move. If they are hard to resist, that is because there is, unusual in contemporary poetry, a genuine tenderness and intimacy in her writing. What results is a poetry both subtle and very beautiful, both inward and intensely aware of the objective world." - Martin Harrison